What is the most ridiculous manual process (which could have quite easily been automated) that you have encountered? How long had it been going on? Did you suggest an alternative and what was the response?
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Oh, boy... Pretty much any process done around my workplace... For example: Customer wants to be emailed an invoice. First, the invoice is printed. Then, the invoice is scanned. It is run through the printer's OCR program. Then anything the OCR got wrong is manually corrected. It is saved as a Word document. Opened over in OpenOffice. Exported as a PDF. Emailed to the customer. I've offered any number of solutions, all of them turned down. All of them rejected because it would require a bit of learning. Unacceptable for the Boss's wife. |
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One guy's job every morning was to come in and open up phpMyAdmin on the production servers and download all the databases, zip them up and place them into folders that were labeled with today's date. Took him 90 minutes every morning. I wrote shell scripts to automate the process. He is doing much more productive things with that time now. |
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The "distributed source control" that I saw at one previous job. Everyone had a copy of the code and a central repository (actually, one dev's copy of the code). When someone made a change, they had to coordinate with the lead dev to make sure they weren't overwriting something else. Every so often (usually when the lead published) all the devs needed to "get latest" by copying the lead's contents to their machine. All this while a Visual SourceSafe instance was running on one of the servers... What did I do?? I started using VSS. (Granted VSS sucks and Mercurial would've fit in nicely there but this was pre-Mercurial) |
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Having to enter into timesheets the exact same information that's already in the CR tracking program, and then make a weekly report of everything you've worked on the last week, which could have easily been scraped from either source. |
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We had a 260 step build process that if one step failed had to be started over. On average taking two work days to complete. After scripting and using xoreax I got it down two hours but I couldn't believe the resistance to automating even such an odious process. |
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I don't know that this is the most ridiculous thing, but it was a complete waste of time. At my job, I'm in the graphics department. We have a standalone laptop segregated from the network, just for the sole purpose of running a PowerPoint slideshow down to a television in the lobby. From time to time we create new slides and update it (by burning the slides to CD from another machine; we can't use flash drives), but there's one particular slide that stays around. It's a weather slide, it displays the current date, and the seven-day forecast (day, date, weather conditions and image, precipitation percentage, high temperature, and low temperature). When I first started, the job of updating this slide was thrown to me. That consisted of turning off the display in the lobby, then going to my desktop computer, pulling up weather.com, copying down the information manually into the slide, then saving the slide to CD, and moving it to the laptop. Took a good 10-15 minutes every morning, not to mention I didn't come in until 8 AM, so everyone there early that morning would see the incorrect date on the slide, until I was able to update it. In my free time the next few days, I learned enough VBA (which I still don't like...) to write up a script that would update the current date, and change the dates for the next 7 days, and set it up to run every day at midnight. Unfortunately, it's still not connected to a network (security reasons...), otherwise I'd find a way to just automate the weather data import from the internet, but I at least put together a simple form that let me type the conditions, precipitation, and temperatures, and it inserts that data and an associated (e.g. cloudy) image where they should go. |
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This is a bit old but was at time when computers were just getting into the mainstream. I had a codebase of many thousands of lines. The release processes called for all deliverables to be printed and send to doc control. If you had changes you marked them in Red pen and sent them in to be "edited". So I go to release my code and they want a "printed" copy. Came out to 600 pages or printed source code. We actually had a drill press in the copy room to "three hole" punch large stacks of documents. |
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Having to send in a printed form for insurance claims instead of being able to do them online. |
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We have a old High Availability SCADA system that when it switches over to the other server has to have someone come into the office to turn the old one back on (into standby). For most cases this really isn't necessary, but the vendor never gave us a way for an operator to just push a button and bring it up. We're not willing to shell out to have the vendor build it for us, so we're just waiting until we buy a nice new system in a few years. |
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Because it's easier to give a man a fish than to teach him to fish I often find myself writing DLL's solely to validate government forms ASCII output. That pretty much consists of one 2,000 line function to match one 100 page spec. This, I believe is the way the US government does things (except they use VB instead of Delphi). To remedy this, I made a generic formula generator that the people who implement our software should be able to set up themselves. |
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